Kankakee Valley Post, Volume 18, Number 41, DeMotte, Jasper County, 10 September 1948 — Years Of F.D.R. Worst For U.S., Priest Charges [ARTICLE]

Years Of F.D.R. Worst For U.S., Priest Charges

Retiring Editor of Catholic World Terms 4 Terms Most Inglorious In Nation’s History A valedictory editorial by the Rev. James M. Gillis, retiring chief editor of “The Catholic World,” influential publication of the Paulist Fathers, indicts the four administrations of the late Franklin D. Roosevelt as “the most inglorious and most disastrous the United States has ever known.” Writing in the September issue of the monthly magazine, the veteran editor and commentator accuses the late President of “deceitfulness, chicanery, falsehood ... not only in international diplomacy but in the conduct of domestic affairs.” Charges Reds Coddled Counts in the Gillis indictment include: 1. Coddling of Communists and, leftists in all departments of the government and in the White House. 2. Fomenting of antagonisms of man against man and class against class. 3. The Pearl Harbor disaster. 4. Surrender of the Balkans to Stalin. 5. The inauguration of a policy and a course of conduct that will keep America embroiled in all the political and military conflicts of the rest of the worlld. Worse Than Blunders; Crimes Agreements made by President Roosevelt and his successor at Teheran, Yalta, and Potsdam are criticized by Father Gillis as “worse than blunders; they were crimes.” He rejects the explana-

tion that the encirclement of Berlin was merely a “fateful mistake.” “They (enclosed) our occupation forces and with them a starving population in an inaccessible pocket. If the defenders of the reputation of F.D.R. insist that he acted stupidly, let them have it so. I prefer to think . .. . that he (or some members of his entourage with his connivance) acted with malice prepense,” the editorial said. 4 Divorces In Family Other members of the Roosevelt family also are denounced in the editorial. Mrs. Eleanor Roosevelt, wrote the Catholic editor, “brought up her children with so ‘modern’ and ‘liberal’ an attitude toward the holy sacrament of matrimony that they have at the present writing achieved four divorces.” Her journalistic activities, he stigmatizes as the work of a person who “dashes off dogmatic decisions on the Bible as a collection of and uses arbitrary smear words to discredit witnesses testifying of Communist infiltration of the government. Elliott Roosevelt’s matrimonial record is characterized by Father Gillis as a “chain reaction of marriage, divorce, marriage, divorce, and marriage.” Elliott’s book of reminiscences about his father, especially the accounts of “crude jestings of father and son about the prime minister of England” was described by the editor as a breach of good taste.